The Sex of the Situationist International* - 1000 Little Hammers

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24 OCTOBER Found photograph reproduced in internationale situationniste 1 (June 1958). sense.” 1 The Situationists most certainly reproduced the gender biases of their time, biases that plagued other radical artistic and political movements of the 1960s. Yet, there is a great deal more to their fascination with erotic imagery than has been acknowledged in the existing literature. Far from a frivolous addendum to or a curious departure from an otherwise progressive political and philosophical agenda, images of women were in fact one of the many platforms from which the Situationists launched their rebuke to capitalism and spectacle. My interpretation follows from two observations. First, the soft-core images that have served as the locus of scholarly debate to date are actually part of a larger group of images of women, including female celebrities, that garnish the pages of IS. Together, these fantasies of femininity comprise two different yet overlapping categories: images of women as objects and images of women as images. 2 Second, despite appearances to the contrary, these images were not scattered randomly throughout 1. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 214, n. 44. Suleiman does not mention the images of women in IS directly, but she is likely referring to these as well as other equally explicit instances of Situationist sexism. See also Peter Wollen, “The Situationist International,” New Left Review 174 (March/April 1989), pp. 94–95, n. 68. Martin Jay and Thomas Levin echo the sentiments of Wollen and Suleiman. See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 231; and Thomas Y. Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord,” in On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957–1972, ed. Elisabeth Sussman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), p. 74. Myriam Maayan is the only scholar thus far to have attempted a more sophisticated (albeit still very abbreviated) analysis of the images of women that so captured the political imagination of the SI, and, as such, I am indebted to her earlier research. Maayan, too, makes room for the possibility that these images were intended in the spirit of critique, but she and I differ on that critique’s exact content. See her article “The ‘Feminine’ in Contemporary French Critical Discourse on the Consumer Society and Utilitarianism,” Contemporary French Civilization 16 (Summer–Fall 1992). 2. My article does not provide an exhaustive inventory of these images.
The Sex of the Situationist International 25 the pages of IS. The essays in which they are reproduced, as well as the captions with which they are paired, might address a broad range of subjects, but they ultimately coalesce around a single issue: alienation. As I will argue here, the images of women appropriated and recontextualized by the SI targeted one type of alienation in particular: the alienation of desire. Desire occupied a place of prominence in Situationist theory and praxis. First and foremost, it was the basis on which the group formulated a working definition of revolution: for the SI, revolution simultaneously required and instantiated “a radical transformation of the structure and character of desire.” 3 Debord put it this way: “We must support . . . the necessity of considering a consistent ideological action for fighting, on the level of the passions, the influence of the propaganda methods of late capitalism: to concretely contrast, at every opportunity, other desirable ways of life with the reflections of the capitalist way of life; [and] to destroy, by all hyperpolitical means, the bourgeois idea of happiness.” 4 With regard to desire, therefore, the Situationists adopted a position that was simultaneously polemical and constructive. They not only mounted a sustained attack on the stunted desires proffered by capitalist society and the mechanisms by which it impaired the expression of authentic desires, they also strove to Found photograph reproduced in internationale situationniste 1. develop a radically new species of desire. In a 1996 essay, Thomas Levin describes their interventions in urban and architectural space in precisely these terms. If the Situationists predicated revolution on “a revolution in desire,” he asserts, they simultaneously predicated the “revolution in desire” on the organization of “new quotidian spaces.” 5 Architecture and urbanism were by no means the only arenas in which the conflict between desire and its alienation was waged, however. Just as often as the Situationists projected this conflict onto space, so too did they project it onto the female body. 3. Thomas Y. Levin, “Geopolitics of Hibernation: The Drift of Situationist Urbanism,” in Situationists: Art, Politics, Urbanism, eds. Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa (Barcelona: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 1996), p. 112. 4. Guy Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Thomas McDonough (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press), pp. 49–50. 5. Levin, “Geopolitics of Hibernation,” p. 113.
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The Sex of the Situationist International* - 1000 Little Hammers

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